Graphic from an engineering study of SiD on beamline. (credit: Marco Oriunno, SLAC)

The SiD detector concept collaboration met at SLAC from January 28 to 30. This meeting was planned last October at the ALCPG07 meeting at Fermilab, as part of the preparation for the Letter of Intent (LOI).

After the news about budget reductions, especially for ILC activities, in December last year in the UK and US, there was considerable discussion within SiD whether to have this meeting or not. In the end we decided to proceed as planned because the call for LOIs still exists and SiD wants to prepare an LOI.

What do you do when you are director of a lab and chairman of a large international committee and have been invited to different events on different continents on the same day, assuming you don't have clones? You try to attend both -- at least virtually. Albrecht Wagner, DG of DESY in Hamburg and chair of the International Committee for Future Accelerators (ICFA), gave an ICFA talk at the opening plenary of this week's TILC08 meeting that he had recorded earlier (Watch the video). He presented a statement agreed on by ICFA at their recent meeting at DESY:

The International Committee for Future Accelerators, ICFA, created to facilitate international
collaboration in the construction and use of accelerators for high energy physics, expresses its
deepest concern about the recent decisions in the United Kingdom and the United States of
America on spending for long-term international science projects.

From BBC
4 March 2008Deadline looms for science cuts
Physicists and astronomers have three weeks to make the case for a number of high-profile projects at risk of being cut from the UK's science portfolio.Read more...

From AP
1 March 2008Particle Collider's Last Big Piece Set
GENEVA (AP) – Engineers on Friday fitted the last major piece into what they say will be the world's largest scientific instrument — a nuclear particle accelerator in a 17-mile tunnel under the Swiss-French border.Read more...

Director's Corner

Science at Sendai

Hitoshi Murayama at the opening plenary session in Sendai.

The ILC community has gathered at Sendai in Japan this week for the joint Asian Committee for Future Accelerators (ACFA) Physics and Detector Workshop and Global Design Effort meeting. The opening session of the meeting was highlighted by a forward-looking science talk by Hitoshi Murayama, called "ILC, Future Particle Physics and Cosmology." Hitoshi pointed to a strong convergence between particle physics and cosmology and gave several arguments why in order to "understand physics at the largest scale of the universe, we need to understand the smallest scale: elementary particles." In the process, he motivated the future need and role of a linear collider by showing its complementarity to the LHC for TeV-scale physics, creating an analogy to the very successful multi-waveband approach used in astronomy and specifically by giving several illustrative examples from other fields of physics.Read more...